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Originally posted by Bink I disagree. All professional video capture cards for PC's make use of the PCI slot. Whether or not AGP is faster makes absolutely no difference, because the PCI slot provides sufficient bandwidth. A video card with VIVO is often crippled in terms of drivers because the company producing them is primarily a video card company, not a capture card company. I find this is especially the case with nVidia based video cards.

I have a PCI capture card (Videum AV) and a VIVO AGP card (Asus V7100DC). The AGP card is far faster than the PCI card. I have seen another AGP VIVO card that was the same way.
What good is bandwidth if the data can't be transfered fast enough (i.e. FPS)?
I do agree regarding the quality of VIVO cards since the VIVO funtion takes a back seat to the main purpose of the card itself.
Why do you say that nVidia cards are worse? Are ATI better, if not what is?

The ATI VIVO cards use the Rage Theatre chip which some users says produces fuzzy captures. Apparantely the Radeon 9000 VIVO and 9700AIW (and presumably all new cards) use a new version of the chip which may be better.

The Nvidia VIVO cards tend to use the Brooktree or Connexant decoder chips which are used in the TV capture PCI cards.

As you correctly state the video in function is usually a secondary consideration and the drivers are not always what they should be. Another consideration with VIVO cards is that because the input is a secondary consideration the board layout may not be optimally arranged for high quality capture as the dual function of the board makes the problem of RF interenence more likely.

The PCI bus does have a lower bandwidth than the AGP bus, which should allow for higher capture resolutions + framerates without dropped frames. (similarly USB1.1 capture devices are limited to lower resolutions by the smaller bandwidth of the bus).

However, as the capture is done in real time the actual capture cannot be any faster with a AGP card rather than a PCI card. (Not withstanding you have a card which employs either special or general relativity )

The time taken to encode a file can vary but it does so with the processor power and to lesser extents memory availability and bandwidth, unless you have a card which has hardware MPEG encoding built in.

I have a PCI capture card (Videum AV) and a VIVO AGP card (Asus V7100DC). The AGP card is far faster than the PCI card. I have seen another AGP VIVO card that was the same way.
What good is bandwidth if the data can't be transfered fast enough (i.e. FPS)?
I do agree regarding the quality of VIVO cards since the VIVO funtion takes a back seat to the main purpose of the card itself.
Why do you say that nVidia cards are worse? Are ATI better, if not what is?

I also have the Asus V7100 Deluxe Combo, so it's capabilities are certainly no mystery to me. I've also done capturing in the past with the Asus V3400 Deluxe. Through the course of study and work, I've had the pleasure of using the Fast AV Master, Pinnacle DV500 Plus and the Matrox RT2000. There's simply no comparsion between these dedicated PCI capture cards and AGP video cards with VIVO.

The dedicated cards didn't drop frames and compressed on the fly, so there's obviously no issue with the PCI bus being a limiting factor. Yet with a lot of AGP VIVO cards, I often find I'm having to tweak the settings just to make a successful capture without dropping frames and with the V7100, it's virtually impossible to capture at full resolution unless the mediocre Asus codec is used. I believe there's more to it then just bus rates, rather quality of the components and the software that drives them is just as critical.

My statement about nVidia based cards was based partly on my own experience and on many recent reviews on the subject. For VIVO, it is frequently said the ATi All-In-Wonders are indeed better.

Bink; thanks for the reply. I would like to talk about this card since we both have one. I looked at your other thread and wonder if I should continue that one of continue here.
The video quality of these VIVO cards is terrible. I use to do video production and mantenance for over 7 years and I have seen beta 3 tapes that looked better!

I doubt these cards pass 2MHz, though in this computer world no one seems to know what bandwidth is.

I'm tring to update my card and get some more preformance out of it with the 3140 drivers but I'm not sure about the add ons. vGart,AGP,4in1,WDM capture etc. What is needed and what order.
Asus's web site isn't much better than 2 years ago and the FAQ's are useless and the manual seems to confuse more.